


Sailed my ship of safety

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: Settle in and find your home [16]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Darcy and Jane's reluctant sisterhood, Darcy has issues, Darcy's poor social skills, Everyone Has Issues, Gen, Jane and Thor's domestic bliss, Jane has issues, Thor likes making breakfast, darcy's backstory, idiosyncratic relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 13:04:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14934797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: How Darcy ended up an SI intern, probably part one.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Slots in somewhere around the same time, chronologically, as Bucky getting Abrikoska. I say "probably part one" because it's not the WHOLE story but the way things are lately if I don't post it it will wait forever, and if nothing else it does clearly set the stage for how and why and also fills in a bunch of Jane and Thor. 
> 
> The author would also at this point like to note that this is a work of fiction, and that opinions, perspectives and mindsets expressed by characters do not necessarily reflect those held by the author. In case that needed to be said. (It also applies to everything I write. Ever.)

[ _Excerpt from the personal journal of Darcy Lewis_ ]

Okay. Lining up the last few days. 

Monday  
\- woke up with pounding headache. No idea why. Not a great start to the day. 

 

\- Thor made breakfast. There are no words for how stupid you feel when you _resent_ a hot guy for making breakfast. It's stupid. Wow, look at Darcy, the petty bitch who's _mad_ that the fucking God of Thunder and Avenger and all around Great Guy got up early and made breakfast for his girlfriend and also coincidentally you! And remembered what you like! Just because!

But seriously I am just about fucking done with Prince Wonderful Guy and his Happy Loving Domestic Holiday like what the fucking fuck are you doing and will you stop being so fucking cheerful about it GOD. 

And then these are the moments where you ask yourself: what kind of garbage am I? 

 

\- hot water ran out. Had to bite my tongue about demanding why since Jane is getting all these fucking grants and hey, Prince Sunshine, are we still living in her mother's crappy London place. 

**REASONS HAD TO BITE MY TONGUE:

a. I have no actual reason to be here because Jane doesn't need me + technically my degree is over + it wasn't even in this fucking field anyway + I am basically still here because I have nothing else to do with my life and no purpose in the universe. 

b. It's not a crappy London place for London it's a really nice place. I am so done with London. Fuck London. Fuck Europe. Fuck me. 

c. There is actually a line where being a bitch gets too much and it's a lower line when you are totally fucking useless. 

 

\- while waiting for hot water, contemplated my total fucking uselessness. Evidence: Jane has grant money! Jane has assistants who are actually fucking physicists now! Jane has Prince Perfect to make sure she eats and sleeps and does her laundry! Wow that pretty much covers everything I was ever any good for. Jane even goes to New York all the time and banters with fucking Iron Man, _just to make sure_ that I'm redundant! 

 

\- Jane was nice to me and made me chocolate-coffee after I got out of the shower. Then she went to go have a conference call. Contemplated suicide except I remembered all ways of dying hurt. 

 

\- got email from Linda saying I hadn't called mom this week and she missed me. Reconsidered above point, but reached same conclusion. 

 

\- called Mom

 

\- came SO CLOSE to getting through call without bullshit maudlin guilt trips. So close. Total wipeout in the last what the fuck ever it is that the last little bit of races are called now they're all in fucking meters which are not even real measurement. I fucking hate metric. 

 

\- Mom goes on wistful and sad about how we never see each other and I never visit and I never call and how sad it is and where did we go wrong and why did she have to live in this facility instead of us being a family, while I beat my head against the wall and bit my tongue and tried not to tell her it's because she a whiny emotional adolescent who used to make me live on lettuce and seaweed juice because her naturopath told her it would cure the cancer she didn't have anyway and because she was so gullible she eventually gave herself a fucking stroke because of fucking herbal supplement tea and that's why she's in the fucking assisted living home which, by the way, is the nicest fucking one ever and also so I don't commit _matricide_ because unlike the incredibly nice people who staff the place she lives I have the patience of a two year old and I know it. 

 

\- didn't say that. Did eventually get into an argument about whether it was totally unreasonable that she wasn't allowed to do juice cleanses. Argument became fight. I hung up. 

 

\- found busywork. Was basically a maid. Got cereal and toilet paper and other shit for the house. Went for a run. Watched movies. Went to bed. 

 

Tuesday  
\- woke up and checked Facebook to find out that apparently Ian is still making posts about how sad it is when things don't work out and someone turns out to be less than you thought they were, but how you treat it as a learning experience and move on, because people won't stop sharing shit he says like it's deeply insightful. 

 

\- cannot say shit because he doesn't actually say this shit to me. He doesn't even fucking name me. I just hear about it because people we mutually know think he's fucking smart so HIS SHIT ends up on MY FACEBOOK FEED through NO FAULT OF HIS. Kinda wish he would just fucking stalk me already. Think I could handle that better than this. 

 

\- made mistake of saying this to Mandy. Mandy freaked out, lectured about how stalking is not a joke, and asked if I even cared about what she's been through. Couldn't actually find an answer that didn't sum up to "no", so I just didn't answer. Turned off Facebook messenger. Assume Mandy's still mad at me. 

 

\- reflected on my failure as a human being. Reflected on how touchy Mandy is. Reflected on whether or not anything is worth it at all. Decided to get up and shower and deal with the day because the spectre of becoming Mom = actually scarier than death. 

 

\- picked up mail. Found Jane's official invites to UN Sciencey Thing she's been waiting for. Also found letter from Mom's facility reminding that their fees go up next month in response to inflation etc bullshit fuck me. 

 

\- pulled up bank account on laptop. Revisited suicide contemplation from yesterday. Reached same conclusion. Pretty sure really miserable person wouldn't care about that. Hey look: I even suck at being depressed. 

 

\- realized that Jane would probably literally not notice if I just stopped paying my part of groceries and then hated myself more than I have ever hated myself for considering just letting that happen. 

 

\- pulled out the papers for the cheaper place for Mom. 

 

\- memory played mashup of every horror story about live-in care institutions ever. 

 

\- with AMAZING TIMING, Mom called back, crying, to apologize for being a terrible mother and ruining my life and taking a stuffed toy away from me when I was six because it was synthetic which _I don't even remember_.

 

\- managed to calm her down and found out Linda was there. Got her to give the phone to Linda who sighed and apologized and said Mom had ducked her enough to get to the kitchen phone and I'd already picked up so she figured it'd get worse if she stopped it. Told Linda it was fine. Told her to give Mom a hug for me. Hung up. 

 

\- wondered if, given Thor etc, Satan might be real, and if he'd really take my soul. Like what would my soul actually be worth? 

 

\- sat there and wondered why this is my life given I saved Earth from aliens twice. Remembered it was because I'm an idiot and never did anything to capitalize on that shit and stayed here to look after Jane instead. Because I'm an idiot. 

 

\- remembered Jane doesn't need me anymore. 

 

\- realized I was sitting there thinking about that and that apparently this is who I am and this is my life and these are my choices. Didn't even know what to do with that. 

 

\- went out to the pub. Did not have any fun at all. Drank too much beer. Got into a (verbal) fight with some blonde bitch at the big table. Got asked to leave. Totally heard someone be snide about Americans when I did. I fucking hate London. 

 

Wednesday  
\- woke up

 

\- was a bitch _all day_ to everyone. Didn't even manage to be funny. Got into a stupid fight with Jane over the dishes. Went and was a bitch on Facebook. Got into multiple stupid fights on Facebook. Even if Mandy's not mad at me TOTALLY LOTS OF OTHER PEOPLE ARE. 

 

\- went to bed and totally didn't sleep. 

 

It's now Thursday and I'm awake. I can't _wait_ to see what today has in store for me! Really.


	2. Chapter 2

Jane wakes up to Thor very gently shaking her shoulder. 

It's still clearly the middle of the night. He's turned on the little reading light by the bed, but there's zero light coming in from behind the blinds and the noise outside is that of middle-of-the-night London, not even of oh-god-it's-early London, and there's no sound of crisis either. 

Thor doesn't need as much sleep as she does, but it also doesn't bother him because apparently he's as different from other Asgardians that way as he is from humans - it's a Thor, Storm-God and Wielder of Mjolnir thing, not a Asgardian thing. So it's apparently totally standard for him to go to sleep for an hour or two, and then wake up and do something quiet and solitary for four hours, and then go back to sleep for another hour or two, in order to keep his basic rhythm the same as other people's. 

With Sif and the Warriors Three, when they were out doing something it usually meant he took the middle two watches and everyone else got more sleep than they would otherwise, which was always good. In Asgard, it meant (he said, slightly wryly and self-deprecatingly) that he actually maybe sat down and studied the things he was supposed to study for a few hours, because there was nothing more fun to distract him because everyone else was asleep. 

Asgard is apparently only a night city on specific major holidays, and otherwise it's almost like living somewhere small in Wales: you better have something vaguely interesting to do at home after seven in the evening because there sure isn't anything going on in town. Like, _nothing_. Nada. 

In small-town USA there's usually at least a bar still open, although come to think of it, Jane's heard there's a couple of places that still have local prohibition and thus don't have bars and she's pretty sure everyone in them must be secretly crazy. But that's probably not news. 

Right now, Jane can see Thor's frowning a little, even as she blinks and squints against the light and waits for her pupils to hurry the hell up and contract so she can see properly again, and she asks, "Something wrong?" 

Thor shakes his head, but clarifies, "No great emergency," hesitates and then says, "Darcy . . . is crying on the sofa downstairs." 

Jane blinks at him and pushes herself up to sitting. She's tired and tactless and says, " _Our_ Darcy? Seriously?" and also entirely gets why he woke her up because that is weird. Darcy is allergic to showing boring human emotions like that. It might mess up her deliberately constructed mystique. 

The thought isn't snide, although Jane knows she'd have to spend about twenty minutes explaining to most people how it's not snide. But it's not: it's just . . . accurate. Darcy _has_ a carefully constructed personally chosen mystique and she's really attached to it, and it does _not_ involve crying. 

Darcy, Jane is pretty sure, actually thinks she's inscrutable. And who knows: maybe, over in Poli-Sci or the rest of the Social Sciences, where you actually get quite a lot of really normal, mainstream people in the programs all the way up to the post-doc work, she is: maybe they actually look at her total lack of appropriate affect for the situation, her deliberately cultivated callousness, her defensive projection of self-centred selfishness and fixation on small and irrelevant details like her god-damn iPod, and they think _here is a shallow snarky jerk_ and think no further. 

Jane couldn't tell you: she doesn't hang out with a lot of Social Sciences people, and especially not PoliSci, for exactly that reason. She has never lived in that world and she finds it actually more alien than she found her brief time on Asgard, to be totally honest. 

Over here in her world, though, all of that shit is a screaming warning sign for _hi, I'm seriously emotionally damaged and can't handle normal human relationships, how are you?_ And if you don't know how to recognize when someone's doing it, that's because _you_ are the person who's doing it. 

Sure, usually the stuff focused on was Your Big Project, because people gave you way more slack about being a selfish asshole who only cares about your magnetometer or mixing together highly explosive chemicals than they do when it's about your iPod that you just got perfectly set up. 

Mind you, they _shouldn't_. Speaking as a certified genuine Obsessive Personality, one of the things Jane likes to make perfectly clear now that she actually gets to do things like go around and give guest lectures is that _shitty behaviour is shitty behaviour_ , and no you do not get a pass for being an asshole just because your work is useful, there are six thousand other people out there who could, given the right training and attention and support, be able to do what you do who _aren't_ assholes. 

But they did. So that's what people fixated on, so they didn't have to have feelings: here's room in the culture for it, especially for guys, for better or worse. And by now Jane is more than able to see that Darcy's occasionally . . . infuriating behaviours are pretty much the same shit, different clothing. 

Which is why Jane puts up with them, more or less, because they're over top of someone who leaps into evacuating people and animals from a doomed town and volunteers to follow Jane and her ignored little project across the whole Atlantic and then herd Jane through a major depressive episode and then save the world again. 

Which is actually really, really impressive, and thoughtful, and kind of touching, and Jane has admittedly been wondering for months if she could consult with someone with _actual skills_ in, you know, psychology, to suggest to Darcy that maybe she could get some therapy for whatever it is that's fucking with her so that the amazing side of Darcy could be more _obvious and visible_ than the side that does in fact make Jane want to drown her in the bathtub on a regular basis. 

It occurs to her right now that maybe Betty Ross would know someone. Didn't she mention dating a psychiatrist when Bruce was all vanished off the face of the earth? Anyone Betty dated for more than a hot minute would be a pretty good person, anyway. 

But _right_ right now, she finishes sitting up and pushing her hair out of her face as Thor nods gravely, acknowledging that yes: Darcy, _their_ Darcy, actually admitting even to herself that she's vulnerable enough to cry, is kind of a major big deal. 

"Did something happen?" Jane demands. "Did someone call?" 

Thor shakes his head. "Nor does she have her phone, nor her computer," he says. "She does have some papers that came in the mail, but I did not draw attention to myself enough to ask her what they were - I am not sure she knew I was downstairs and I was not sure if I should alert her." 

Jane scrubs her hands over her face, willing herself to wake up, and nods. 

Thor and Darcy get along great when Darcy's on an even keel. When Darcy's snappish, she's snappish and it just sort of rolls off Thor like water off a duck's back. Jane supposes growing up with someone like Loki would be good for developing those reflexes. 

But when Darcy's moody - the closest she usually gets to actually being upset - and her sense of humour turns really edged, Thor says he's mostly just not sure how to respond to her, since she takes anyone asking what's wrong as a kind of personal attack and stomps off to go do something else, but also keeps being moody and edged if you don't ask. 

With Jane, at least, she'll maybe get into a more-or-less fight and Jane will get a chance to tell her she's kind of being a bitch and after the sulking is over, Darcy'll be pointedly back to being Fine, She's Fine, She's Always Fine, Everything's Fine Here Thanks, How Are You? and then everything's, well, fine. Temporarily at least. 

So of course for something like this, he'd just slowly back away and come and find Jane, even knowing that it really does kind of - 

That it's a worrying sign, although who knows what of. 

For a few minutes, Jane seriously considers just going back to sleep. It's selfish, and also a little bit cowardly, but she does. She'll own it. 

There is _no way_ that this is not going to involve Darcy being Her Worst for at least a very limited amount of time, and actually if it doesn't that just means that whatever it is _is so bad_ that sorting _that_ out's going to be a headache. Part of Jane really wants to say that she should go to sleep and bring it up in the morning. 

But a) she's not going to bring it up in the morning and she knows it and also b) even if she did, Darcy would by then have shut everything down to a point where she _could_ fend Jane off, even if Jane decides to be nosy as possible, and it'll get nowhere until something else falls apart later and by then it'll almost certainly be Much Worse. 

Whatever "it" is. 

Jane knows this, because to find out whether Darcy had actually finished her dissertation and done her defense and, you know, _all the actual things she, as a grad student, needed to do_ , she'd had to go to school, and then to the PoliSci department and find out from them who Darcy's supervisor even _was_ and then ask _him_ about it. 

He, at least, did have a clue; Jane had been so worried that he might not, because see also: not being sure if Darcy's as easy to read Over There. Dr Yeltsin had assured Jane that Darcy had indeed both finished and defended and done pretty well, and that her work had actually benefitted in depth and scope by being involved in saving the world from things you just wish really _were_ mythical legendary monsters and turned out not to be, and so on. 

At the same time he'd completely understood why asking Darcy about this had been a total no-go. _She's a very heavily defended person,_ he'd said during their phone conversation, with a sigh. _I'm sure you've noticed._

_Do you even know why?_ Jane had given in and asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the flat in Reykjavik. 

_Something to do with her mother,_ Yeltsin had answered, _but I couldn't tell you what, because I've got no idea. I tried to follow up on it once and she actually stopped responding to even my emails long enough that I was worried she had disappeared somewhere, or at least dropped the program, and then when she sent me the next part of her draft to look over she acted like it had never happened. Good luck,_ he'd added. _She's a great person when she's not on the defensive, but she's really good at being on the defensive._

And damn was he right about that. 

Jane looks at Thor, and Thor answers with a shrug, a silent admission he's got no good ideas on how to Handle Darcy Lewis either, sorry. Jane puts her face kind of theatrically in her hands for a minute and then says, "Okay, um. Pass me my hair elastic and I'll go talk to her. Could you go make some coffee, or tea, or . . . something hot and alcoholic?" she adds, plaintively. 

Thor kisses her on the forehead. "Good luck," he says - about Darcy, not about the drink - and that's oh-so-reassuring. 

 

Darcy is, in fact, still crying - sitting on the sofa with her legs pulled up, hugging her knees - when Jane turns on the hall light and pauses in the door to the living room. She's also clearly been crying for a while, because her eyes are red. 

She also _also_ kind of looks, right in this second, like she'd like to set Jane on fire with her mind. Just for a second, but it's a really _loud_ second. 

Then she's obviously trying to settle back into something like her usual . . . whatever, and not managing it very well. 

"Hey," Jane says. She turns on the light, as Darcy puts her feet on the floor, straightens up, swallows and tries to force her face into an expression of _wow so nothing is going on here, nope_. It takes Darcy a second to find her glasses and put them back on, and Jane takes that time to go sit in the arm-chair that faces the sofa. "What's up?" 

"Nothing," Darcy says, flatly. Her hands make a liar out of her, as she grabs for the papers on the table: they're unsteady and she moves too fast, so instead of picking the papers up she knocks them on the floor and Jane picks them up instead. "No," Darcy says, "I don't want you to - " 

All of Jane's instincts . . . no. Not her instincts, her _habits_ , her normal ways of interacting with other people and thinking about how relationships work and all that jazz, all of _that_ screams at her to hand the papers to Darcy without looking at them, to not be a nosy bitch, to respect privacy, so all of those things. 

Her actual instincts know that if you completely respect Darcy's autonomy as an adult human being she will do things like try to secure the release of someone she's not related to from psychiatric custody and also try to harass a major international spy operation to listening to her and all that kind of stuff, and she will not ask for help, and while that kind of thing can and did contribute to saving the world it is a shitty, shitty thing to need to do in every-day life about stuff _she needs help with_. 

So while totally acknowledging that Darcy might get really angry and in fact she'll even have the right to get really angry, instead of passing her the papers, Jane pulls them to herself and looks down at them. 

One is a letter from a residential facility for people with - Jane squints at the title - traumatic or acquired brain injuries, which is very polite and conciliatory and basically boils down to them having done everything they can to secure state and other funding and they still really need Darcy to send the rest to cover her mother or they're going to have to ask her to give up her spot. 

One is a printed bank statement showing a substantial overdraft. Another couple look like statements for things like mutual funds and - Jane turns it around the right way - a trust, which are also not showing reassuring figures and have things like "max. yearly withdrawal" circled or underlined. 

And one is a brochure for a residential facility, obviously different from the first one - the whole presentation more corporate in the "we have twelve facilities and they all run like clockwork which means if your loved-one doesn't fit in the clockwork they'll get ground down" way, that kind of thing. A lot of buzzwords, a lot of really glossy pictures of people with perfect whitened smiles and just the required amount of Diversity in the stock photos, but not a lot of meaning. 

Jane puts the papers back together and holds them out to Darcy. Darcy takes them, but keeps her eyes away from Jane's face, staring at the wall over her shoulder and up a bit, the way you do when you're hoping a slight tilt to your head will keep the tears in your eyes and draining nicely into your sinuses before they actually drip out of your eyes. 

It's a stance that Jane is super familiar with. From the inside. 

"I don't want to talk about it," Darcy says, in the same flat voice as before, except a little more choked up. 

And the thing is this: 

Jane owes Darcy a lot. She knows that. She is _totally fine_ with acknowledging that both to herself and others. 

And she likes - okay, maybe even loves, in a little-sister way - Darcy a lot, in the way that you kind of have to when you've been through two near-disasters with someone and they dragged you through a major depressive episode and then trained both you _and_ your alien boyfriend in how to deal with your trauma-based anxiety disorder when you've just come back from having a weird source-of-universe-wrecking-power hanging around in your body for a couple days, almost killing you, and then almost dying multiple times, and also having the whole mess kill said boyfriend's mother and adopted brother and . . . .stuff. 

Jane's always suspected that part of Everything Darcy Wouldn't Talk About had to be involved with why the hell Darcy - the last person you'd expect - would even know that stuff. And she did. 

She might have the most put-upon aggrieved attitude about sharing it in the universe, but she did: she knew what a panic attack looked like and what to do about it, she knew when to tell Jane that the first doctor she saw was being an asshole and she needed a second opinion and how to coach Thor into what exactly to say when he did the Support Thing, she could cite studies about sleep and nutrition needs and all kinds of shit. She could even hand Thor a pretty useful book about grief. And she did that, too. 

And it helped. It's been a big deal. Hell, it was a big deal to have Darcy here before that, too, harassing and aggravating Jane out of bed and into the shower, making her keep track of bills so she didn't have to keep calling her mom about them, physically dragging her out of the flat sometimes, and for all that it ended in kind of a messy break-up even _recruiting Ian_ to actually help her keep the basics of the work in repair while Jane was neck deep in all kinds of mental badness. 

It's kind of embarrassing, exactly when that hit. It means that it always _sounds_ like she went all Bella Swan, with Thor as absent Edward. And for Jane especially that's just really humiliating, which was part of what she was handling at the time. 

It's also not exactly true, as the second doctor - the good one - pointed out after the attack in Greenwich. 

Dr Larch had looked at her over the top of his glasses - the part where he looked like Santa Claus hadn't hurt, when it came to feeling comfortable with him - and said, "Jane, I would like to offer you a reframing of all that we have covered so far in this history, mm?" 

And then went on to point out that "losing your father traumatically at a young age" + "just because you and your mother have sorted out a functional relationship now and that it wasn't at all her fault doesn't mean her meltdown during your adolescence didn't amount to a massive abandonment and loss right at the most stressful possible time" + "your undergrad honours advisor actually had a _vendetta_ against you and you only graduated when you finally went to your father's old friend for help" + "by the way those three 'bad patches' in undergrad were actually major depressive episodes and breakdowns" + "do we even need to discuss your PhD" (and no, they didn't, even Jane can see how messed up her PhD and her asshole supervisor and the other student were without even needing any help) + "the stresses of being a woman in STEM, especially one whose work is considered ridiculous" + "that relationship we also don't need to discuss" + New Mexico + the Battle of New York + Erik getting _completely messed up_ and not being able to help him even after everything he'd ever done for her which was a _lot_ \+ everyone subtly stonewalling her despite it being _her goddamn research and work_ that broke everything open . . . . 

All of that together more or less earned the right to have a (or rather, another) major depressive episode all by themselves, and if anything, initially the sense of validated self-worth that does admittedly come when someone amazing is into you had probably been staving it _off_. So that when she started seriously doubting that, she just stopped having any resources anymore. 

It sucked. 

But it would have been a lot worse without Darcy deciding to stick around and look after her. For no real objective reason, either: Jane'd long ago signed off on Darcy's intern hours for credit, it still wasn't Darcy's field of study and she certainly didn't _tell_ Jane she'd been getting material from their experiences and besides, for those months here in London, she wouldn't've been. 

Jane absolutely recognizes all of that, and all of what it means.

She just wishes she weren't absolutely sure that trying to get Darcy to accept the help _she_ obviously needs isn't going to be such a _thankless bitch of a task_. 

So here and now, as Darcy says, "I don't want to talk about this," Jane looks at her levelly for a minute or two, and takes a silent deep breath. 

"Too bad," she says, evenly. Darcy shakes her head, a tight, violent little motion. 

"It's got nothing to do with you," she bites out. "It's none of your business, and I'm sorting it out. Just . . .fuck off." 

Jane frowns, not because of what Darcy's just said, but because the part where she went to it so fast - without any more complicated or artful ways of trying to piss Jane off enough to leave it alone - means this is _really_ serious. So . . .fine. 

_Fine_. 

She will just do this the really harsh way. 

"Darcy," she says, in the same voice as before, "don't make me find a way to just dump a hundred thousand dollars in your account and then stop answering any way you try to contact me. Because I will do it, and that's just going to be stupid, and a waste of time and energy." 

"You don't _have_ a hundred thousand dollars," Darcy snaps, but it feels like it's reflexive. 

"I can _get_ a hundred thousand dollars," Jane snaps back. "That's a thing that's a truth in my life now. It's weird and it weirds me out and it's kind of uncomfortable but I can do it and since obviously at least most of the current problem is money I will do it if I have to, so unless you just want to _deal with that_ you should stop being stupid and tell me what's going on so I can help you figure out some other solution." 

They're both technically right: Jane does not have, right this second, a hundred thousand dollars, or anything like it, freed up and ready to go. The current big project with Cambridge is funded, and funded _nicely_ for once in Jane's goddamn life, because the implications of being able to adequately track and interpret the kinds of disturbances caused by - oh, just as _one example_ \- giant damn inter-space wormholes opening up and closing, and giant battleships materializing over Greenwich, are _pretty globally important_ and this time Jane had actually had the energy and self-assurance to make sure that she was the one going "ex-fucking-cuse me do you not know who I _am_?" when she needed to. 

But that's all earmarked. _All_ earmarked. Some of it's earmarked to actually, you know, pay her so that she can take over the taxes and other costs of the flat, which keep going up as the neighbourhood gets more and more desirable, and so on, but it's earmarked. 

There's also funds in accounts that are actually Thor's, set up by the Icelandic Althing with some kind of diplomatic justification and then invested with Tony's accounting department's advice to basically grow like mushrooms, but it's not meant to be that big or to just . . . frivolously spend. 

So on that score, Darcy's right. 

On the other hand Jane is actually _completely sure_ she could call Tony Stark right this minute and go "I need a hundred thousand dollars to keep my former intern's mother from having to leave her really nice assisted living facility can you give me a hand and I'll get it back to you on instalments" and what she'd have to argue about is actually getting him to let her give it back because to him that's basically pocket money and he doesn't care. 

This is because Tony _also_ needs therapy. Just, so much therapy. Jane actually likes him, a lot, which shocked the hell out of her - likes him, and these days straight up values him as a friend, and is pretty sure she's totally clear to use that term. 

But if Darcy could use _some_ therapy then even on that scale Tony needs _all the therapy_. 

So Jane would insist on finding some way to even things up, not because the money matters but because she thinks it's _really bad for him_ to get the idea that this is his worth as a friend. But that would be totally open for her to figure out. 

Darcy knows it, too. 

Darcy glares at her. For a long time. 

As she glares, her eyes get more and more watery and eventually overflow, and she glares over Jane's shoulder again while she viciously wipes under her glasses and messes up the mascara she's apparently still wearing. 

"It's fine," she says, which it clearly isn't. "It's my own goddamn fault, I got lazy, I got wrapped up in inertia and didn't go find something to do, I can figure it out. I don't need you." 

Jane sighs. "You sound like a bad teen drama TV show," she says, bluntly. 

"Fuck you," Darcy shoots back which is really, really at the bottom of the Darcy Lewis repartee scale. 

"Will you just tell me what the fuck is going on?" Jane asks, folding her arms and settling in to be Stubborn - right up there to Stubborn enough to follow Darcy if she decides to try to storm out of the room. To get Thor to remove a door Darcy might try to put in the way, even. 

"If it will help I will write you an official letter of my admiration for your independence and solitary capability," she adds, somewhere between dry and acid, "and how I am totally aware that you can completely take care of yourself and everyone else and nothing ever gets to you and blah blah blah but for fuck's sake, _given all of that_ you are crying on the sofa at two o'clock in the morning so it's obviously bad so just fucking _tell me_ , will you?" 

Darcy swallows and wipes at her eyes again. "You know," she says, mostly to the sofa cushion and in a really good effort at her usual voice, "for someone with so little practice being a bitch you're really good at it some times." 

"Oh my god, Darcy," is all Jane says in reply to that, letting out all the exasperated sigh she wants to put in the words. If she weren't as worried as she is, she'd probably be more pissed off, but it seriously can't get much headway. 

This is the moment Thor chooses to come in with three mugs of what turns out to be hot spiced cider. For a second Jane's worried that it's a bad moment, that Darcy's going to rally up to being even more difficult just for the sake of being difficult at this point, and fights not to close her eyes in a kind of all-over Wince. 

But it turns out to be the opposite. 

Darcy takes the mug Thor hands her on a kind of automatic. She stares at it as Thor sits down and then stares at him sitting in the other arm-chair looking Concerned and Attentive (and on him the capital letters really are appropriate). Then she stares at Jane. 

Then her eyes overflow again, and she says, "I fucking hate both of you." 

 

An hour, a lot of cider, and what feels like pulling teeth for every sentence later, Jane has established the following facts: 

1\. Darcy's father was a prize-winning asshole and Jane does not blame her one bit for being completely indifferent to the fact that he died in a car crash about four years ago. "I'd just call him my sperm-donor," Darcy says, "but then people are stupid and get confused." 

Jane also wonders who Darcy is hanging out with where an acid reference to a sperm donor _doesn't_ mean "my biological father is the worst", but then she remembers that Darcy went to a nice private school and then hung out with normal people in undergrad. 

Anyway, Darcy's father had apparently walked out on Darcy and her mom sometime around when Darcy was six, and while Darcy says she has relatively little memory of him at all, she's pretty clear on the fact that him royally fucking her mother around took what might have been a bit of a tendency to hypochondria and fad-dieting and turned it into what really sounds to Jane like a full-blown mental illness. 

She's pretty sure there is one of those, where the thing that's obsessed you is Being Healthy and you do all kinds of dangerous, stupid, untried, unhealthy things in a fixated pursuit of purity and clean health. Something-exia. But this really isn't the moment to hit up Google and try to make it tell her what the name is. 

 

2\. As a result of _that_ , firstly apparently Darcy had spent most of her childhood up to around the age of fourteen either living through her mother's lifestyle obsessions (including "live on juice and smoothies", "extreme veganism", "attempt at extreme carnivorism", "raw eggs will cure cancer" and "only green things are food", among others), trying to deal with life when the latest one did not actually fix everything and bring on perfect health and happiness and so her mother ended up in bed for two weeks, or both. 

This, Jane feels, explains a lot about Darcy. In fact she kind of suspects this explains almost everything about Darcy, from her ability to deal with the absolutely insane without doing more than blinking or being excited that it looked neat, through her intense need to be looking after _someone_ , to her pathological refusal to admit she has real, human emotions, let alone display them. 

About halfway through this part of the story Thor gets that slight expression that says he'd really like to at the least put a hand on Darcy's shoulder and earnestly tell her that he's sorry all that happened and reassure her of her value in life in general, but is pretty well aware that it's going to go over badly. Jane's not sure that you can't explain a lot of how Thor was when and apparently just before they first met from the fact that apparently this was how dealing with Loki was _their entire lives_ , driving Thor to become blithely thoughtless out of self-defense. She's also not sure anyone else would even catch that expression. 

At this point she can totally see that expression. 

 

3\. More importantly, though, Darcy's mother's obsession with herbs, health food, "health" and everything else, eventually lead her to start dosing herself with something called "country mallow", sida cordifolia, in powdered form every morning. 

It turns out that sida cordifolia's active ingredient is motherfucking _ephedrine_. 

"Like, ephedrine ephedrine," Jane says, knowing the answer is yes. "The amphetamine-class drug. _Ephedrine_." 

"Yeah," Darcy says, mouth twisted up in bitter-wry amusement. "That'd be the one." 

"Oh god," Jane says. She feels the need to actually cover her face with her hands in order to clearly convey the amount of _oh god_ she means. It's a lot of _oh god._ "And she just . . . poured a powdered form of the herb into her mouth every morning." 

"Yup," says Darcy. And at least she seems to be getting some satisfaction and validation out of Jane's horror, so there's that. 

"And just like . . . the herb. Not an isolate, or anything. So with . . . no idea how much she was actually taking," Jane asks, just to get the full horror of it all. And there's a lot of horror. 

That's the _problem_ with "herbal". . . . well, everything. It either does nothing, or sure: there's a chemical in there that works! But you have _no way of telling_ how much of it there is in any given dose, and by the time you've isolated it so that you can control it _hey_ it turns out that _medicine has probably already done that_ and either sells it in pills you can grab off the shelf or the FDA has made it illegal to do that without at least doctor supervision because it's too fucking dangerous. 

"Yup," Darcy repeats. "Just like that. Every morning for a year." 

Jane takes a deep breath, trying to take this in. " . . . did she have a stroke?" she asks, eventually, since Darcy appears to be waiting for it. 

"Oh no," Darcy says, with some apparent malicious satisfaction. "She had _three_ strokes. The first two were smaller, and I wasn't around for the start of them, and she'd already, like, _for-bid-den me_ to tell any of the doctors about her home remedies because she knew exactly what they'd say. But I was there all the way through the third one and it actually had all the way up into the, like, droop - " she gestures to one side of her face, " - like her face was fucking icing that got too warm or something, and while the paramedics were getting her into the ambulance I grabbed her _whole fucking box_ full of shit and brought it with us and shoved it at the doctors." 

Darcy shrugs. "She didn't recover from that one," she says. She sounds more frustrated than sad. "Like she didn't _die_ or anything. She just never got better." 

 

4\. Her dad might be absolute shit, but her paternal grandparents weren't. 

First off when he walked out they'd apparently hunted him down, cornered him and forced him to set up a trust for Darcy with not only all he would have owed for child support but quite a bit more, and pretty wise investments. They also put a bunch of money in it, because they had it. 

"They were engineers," Darcy says. "They didn't meet until they were in, like, their forties and they only had that asshole anyway. They were always kind of weird and quiet and uncomfortable around people and when they were around Mom it was like she was some kind of totally out of control chihuahua and they were afraid of dogs but trying to be polite." 

That had more or less been Darcy's mother's only income for several years before her strokes, but it'd also been more or less comfortable. When it started being obvious her mom wasn't going to recover soon enough to actually take back over being Darcy's guardian (not, Jane thinks, that she'd been doing a great job before) they willingly stepped in. 

Jane has this picture of the quiet, socially awkward, repressed eighty-year-old (or more) people Darcy describes, and she holds it up with the image she has of angry, repressed, bitter, terrified and grieving fourteen-year-old Darcy, and looking at that picture it is no surprise that everyone involved - including not only Darcy but the social worker and the psychiatrist that had been brought in at that point - thought it would be best for Darcy to go to a really good boarding school somewhere. 

She ended up at Chatham Hall, which wasn't really far from where she'd been before and where the few friends she had still were, and her grandparents had willingly put up the mind bogglingly high (to Jane) tuition and boarding fees. 

Even Darcy says it wasn't bad, but on the other hand Jane figures you'd need a miracle for a boarding school in, like, 2003, to have a counselling staff up to actually helping Darcy with all the shit she was coming in with. 

Darcy had graduated with high marks and gotten into her undergrad, going from the dorms at the boarding school to the dorms at the university. When her grandfather died of pneumonia - six months after her grandmother had died from complications from a broken hip - Darcy ended up with the proceeds from the sale of their home, all of their savings, and the life-insurance payouts. 

 

5\. Since her strokes, Darcy's mother's been living in what honestly sounds like an amazing long-term care-home in upstate New York. It's on a farm, has all the various therapists and physicians come to the shared home in order (says the website that Jane looks over while Darcy talks) to give the residents the utmost possible sense that this is their home, not a hospital, while still providing round-the-clock qualified nursing care in an appropriately-adapted home environment. 

There's equine therapy, a private pool and gym environment with all the necessary supports, an arts studio, and music lessons available. 

Darcy's mom still has some residual partial-paralysis in her left arm and leg, as well as ongoing pain, but it's mostly the cognitive stuff that means she needs constant care. Her memory is very poor, her concentration is worse, and while her impulse control and emotional control hadn't been stellar before the strokes they were abysmal now. 

"Basically it's like she's three," Darcy says flatly. "Except not, because she's an adult and all that and unlike a three year old you can't actually pick her up and put her in her room on time out if she screams at you. So it's a lot worse. She's always mad because they won't let her do the stupid eating stuff she's always wanting to do, but otherwise it's a great place and, like. She has a life. Like a real one, where she's not in a fucking hospital or whatever. Just with the help she needs because her brain's fucked up." 

As one would imagine, that kind of care isn't cheap. The trust, the inheritance and the life-insurance had managed to get Darcy through undergrad and her PhD but, Jane sighs internally, that's still almost half a million dollars in tuition, between the two degrees. Plus living expenses. Add on both the care-home and any other medical expenses her mother racked up, and that was . . . a lot of money. 

Jane feels slightly guilty: the initial internship with her had been strictly for credits, so in effect Darcy had been paying to be in New Mexico rather than the other way around. If Jane had _realized_ there was this kind of drain, this kind of problem, she'd've insisted Darcy go back and get some kind of stipend or TA or hell found some way to make sure she was paying the girl herself. _Somehow_. 

Of course that was part of why Darcy made sure she didn't know. Jane is absolutely well aware of how this shit works. 

So now the reservoir is starting to look more like a hole in the ground, metaphorically speaking. And that's a problem. 

Not that Darcy will admit it's a problem, even now. 

"It's fine," she says. "I'm not broke yet. I just sat on my ass too long, I need to make some adjustments and get myself going, that's all." 

Which is such a lie. Jane is _well aware_ of how valuable a long-term care placement you really can trust is, and how much risk is involved in looking at a new place even if you're right there to look over their shoulder. Some of her own first memories are the hell her parents went through getting a good place for her grandfather. And being there to look right over their shoulder would mean Darcy would have to go live in upstate New York, within easy visiting distance of her mother, which does not actually sound like something that would be good for Darcy's mental health right now. To put it mildly.

Also if any of that were remotely true, _Darcy_ would not have been sitting here crying in the middle of the night when she thought nobody would find her. 

But it's three am, both Jane and Darcy have had two hot ciders, and at least now everything's out in the open where Jane can take another stab at it tomorrow. "Okay," she says. "Let's just . . .go to bed for now." 

And Darcy's more than willing to take the excuse to flee. So Jane lets her. 

 

It's easier to corner Darcy in the morning, because if there is one thing Darcy is actually pretty terrible at it's waking up before she has to. Thus, Jane can be in the kitchen with cut fruit on the table, Thor making french toast, and all three different coffees (french press light roast for Thor, cafe au lait for Jane herself, and - for who knows what stubborn reason - instant dark roast with sugar in it for Darcy) waiting when Darcy manages to make it, bleary-eyed, out of her bedroom. 

She stops in the other doorway sweater pulled on over her pjs, and stares just short of a hostile glare at the table. "Oh fuck," she says. 

"You're welcome," Jane says dryly, as Darcy - with a huge show of reluctance - comes in and sits down across from her. Thor puts the french toast on the table between them. 

Thor seems to take a particular delight in cooking. Jane's not a hundred percent sure why, other than maybe he literally never did it before he came to Earth. Before that, as far as she's gathered, food was something that just happened. You wanted food, and then food appeared, unless it was an active campaign. 

Then you wanted food and went and asked for it from the quartermaster, and then he or she or it made food appear. 

"Cooking" - taking food from its raw state and turning it into something people wanted to eat - didn't seem to be an Asgardian royal priority. 

It also might be something to do with how he's usually cooking for at least two people, too, so there's a kind of very basic providing-for-others thing that goes on. Jane has the startings of a private theory that she'll probably share once she acquires more evidence for it but for now she's keeping to herself, which is this: even when he was being kind of a spoiled arrogant royal pill, Thor was and is trained in a really bone deep way to look after other people. 

Like Asgard in general and Odin in particular might not have managed to guide him well enough to skip the entitled dillweed stage, because details are important, but early training and probably some personal inclination mean that Thor is absolutely driven to be responsible for other people. To look after them. To take care of them. 

In said dillweed stage this had combined in some apparently really sub-optimal ways with pride, self-regard and thoughtlessness. Jane has actually pointed out that if those, as fundamental attributes, really _are_ going to be hanging offenses then like . . . at least seventy-five percent of the people she knows are totally going to die. 

And definitely ninety-five of the people under twenty-two. 

That doesn't mean it doesn't end bad, but as far as Jane can see the entire point of having older, wiser people _around_ is actually that they're supposed to drag younger people through the dillweed stage without actually getting anyone hurt. 

And also that when it came to the really stupid expedition to Jotunheim that _to be fair_ there actually had been a huge damn problem, to whit: Loki had found secret ways on and off Asgard and used them to bring _actual fucking hostile forces into the treasury_ , resulting in the deaths of multiple guards. Which Odin had kind of just waved off without giving Thor any real indication that he was going to do something about it, or was concerned about it, or was taking it seriously. 

So that was a thing. 

Then she'd changed the subject because Thor's expression had started to get the edge of sadness that inevitably comes with that, and Jane fully respects his right to have tangled and grief-filled emotions about his adopted brother even if as far as she's concerned that was a coincidental case of good riddance to bad rubbish that managed to make itself useful, for once. 

Love is complicated. 

The point is that even most of Thor's stupidest mistakes have been, as far as Jane can see, centred around this really important identity that's tangled right up in Taking Care Of People. 

There's a level it terrifies her on, because she is super not sure how long it's going to take before hanging out on one world out of how many, one Realm out of Nine, feels like a total abdication of responsibility. And before that becomes a problem. 

Which is complicated by how she doesn't even yet know how to approach understanding Thor's sense of scale of time, which seems to be both very similar to the human scale and yet can't possibly be totally similar, seeing as he's already hundreds of years old. 

She's kind of avoided pursuing this yet because she doesn't want to. For now, that's all very firmly in the realm of "I will burn that bridge when I come to it". There's only so much she can handle at once. 

In the meantime, it is really nice having someone who's so enthusiastic about making breakfast food, Jane has _got_ to say. Especially when she can use it - like now! - as part of psychological siege warfare. 

There is _probably_ something wrong with needing to use that kind of metaphor when you're trying to talk your former intern into letting you do something to help her, but what can Jane say: _that's Darcy_. 

"We need to talk about getting you a job," Jane informs her, dishing out two pieces of french toast, and watches Darcy's jaw go tight. 

 

It takes an hour and a half, another half-batch of french toast, another round of coffee, and an entire debate about the ethics of nepotism and what does and doesn't count as nepotism, and whether it counts as an ethical misdeed if the system already exists and your participation in it is demonstrably neutral in the perpetuation of or cessation of the system, and if it matters if at most what the system is actually going to do is merely potentially compensate for systematic barriers based on perceived gender, economic background and socio-class based cues, to reach a basic compromise. 

Jane is desperately glad that Thor seems to literally like reading _everything he can_ about Earth and how shit works here because there were at least a few points where even if she knew she still had a point, she was running out of the right terminology and contextual examples to make it. Especially since Darcy is apparently obnoxiously good at dropping from what is in all honesty the jargon of _her_ field, not Jane's, into colloquial language reframing that is _really effective_ at making counterarguments sound stupid _even when they're not_ , and then back again. 

Apparently having Thor jump in to very gravely and sincerely point out stuff about the balance of institutional power and Darcy's complex place in it is just unsettling enough to be effective, especially since Darcy kept getting sidetracked into, "Where did you even read this?" 

And since the whole thing is, Jane is absolutely dead certain, _literally_ just a cover exercise for the fact that when it comes down to it, letting someone else do something for _her_ that might actually help her, without any transactional or other mitigating element, makes Darcy feel incredibly vulnerable and a bunch of other emotions she finds really unpleasant, that's good. 

Jane wonders if she could _trick_ Darcy into getting therapy. 

The compromise they come to is simple: Stark Industries has an internship program. A _paid_ internship program, which pays pretty well. While yes some of the internships are specifically for various STEM-related fields, a whole crapload of them aren't, and are basically for the general bureaucratic and human resources mass mess that you have to have in order to run a company like that. 

In fact part of the point (according to even SI's own white-paper on the program) is for participants to _discover_ the myriad different streams and specialization bullshit that exists and find out what they're good at, and acquire skills they need, and so on. It's a really good program, as far as Jane can tell, and the rest of the world seems to think so too. 

People who go through that program seem to basically be able to roll up at other companies they want to work with and name their salary. A lot of them just stay on with SI, though, because SI just pays them better. 

It's also notoriously tricky to get into, although it's not quite for the same reasons as a lot of others. Stark Industries encourages everyone and their cat to apply, but there's a limited number of spots, and the intern applications go through the same rigorous process as normal hires at the company. 

Jane doesn't totally follow the whole thing, but from what she sort of managed to gather from the one student she's already written a recommendation letter for, the first round takes the application and the resume, opens a specific file and file-number, and then generates a version of the application and resume that's been stripped of as many details as possible that might identify stuff like age, sex, gender presentation, race, socio-economic status, all of it, with at least some of those just blanked and others replaced by numbers or known system values. 

So instead of actually naming the school or the program that an applicant went to, it replaces those values with ranked designations based on SI's own assessment of schools and programs worldwide. Which aren't always the same as everyone else's. But instead of _Whatever University Business School_ or something like that, the system designates _Tier 3 Business School_. And stuff like that. 

_Then_ the anonymised packages get handed to the first round of HR reviewers. And so on. Eventually, Jane gathers, the HR people tend to end up with a pool of candidates that are all pretty much on par with one another, but are still generally five to six times more than the actual slots available. Then there's the round with the recommendation letters, which are actually similarly anonymized, with the writers assigned to various levels of Relevance in their opinions based on a lot of different factors. 

There's still usually at least two and often four times more applicants than spaces at that point. If it's just twice as many, they go right to actual interviews; if it's more, though, there's a straight-up lottery on the first round of interview calls. Sometimes they have to lottery the second round of callbacks, too, depending. 

Jane's argument is that anyone who doesn't think Darcy is qualified to do whatever the fuck she wants to do in an organization or management situation is a _total and complete moron_ and that yes actually having handled all the stuff she has in fact handled over the past few years makes her more qualified than any of their other applicants. 

Darcy's argument - at least, the argument that actually holds any water - was that by the time you've stripped identifying factors out of her resume it either looks like she's the most generic and useless person ever, or like she's the world's biggest _liar_ , so there's still no point in her applying there. 

Jane's second argument is that she is once again absolutely sure that she could text Tony right now and say _hey remember Darcy my intern she needs a job_ and this would all be irrelevant. 

Darcy's argument was about how that's nepotism and nepotism is the downfall of society. 

Jane's argument there is honestly _welcome to fucking academia, business, politics and also the rest of the world, I'll believe this is a principled stand more than it's a way of self-sabotage when pigs fly_ but she knows that one's not going to work. Especially not since - as Darcy points out - the whole SI hiring system is supposed to avoid that kind of thing and actually just hire The Best. 

Fortunately that was when Thor pointed out that in effect Darcy is an outlier who shouldn't be counted (leading to Darcy flatly informing him that whoever showed him Tumblr should be fucking shot, but he ignored that), because in this very specific case the very things that were supposed to make the system fair were actually making it unfair. 

And that this is unavoidable in systems set up to deal with significant volumes of situations because the universe is infinite and then something about unique cases Jane honestly didn't follow (which is what made Darcy demand how he even had ever read some book or other Jane has never heard of), and eventually that line of argument lead to Darcy sitting with her lips pressed into a thin line. 

Jane eventually gets her to come around to the simple compromise: she'll talk to Tony about skipping the first layers of the application, and get Darcy in at the final interview stage. From there, Darcy will take it herself, and if she screws up the interview, that's on her. 

That settled, Darcy sort of half-slinks, half-stomps her way back into her room and then ten minutes later is dressed and going Out, somewhere. Who knows where. Probably a pub or something. 

After the door closes behind her, Jane sighs and literally puts her own forehead on the table. 

Thor rubs her upper back for a minute, which is nice. When she sits up he's frowning thoughtfully towards the door. 

"She would never agree to see a . . . " he frowns, "the physicians that are for your mental health. She wouldn't go to one, would she?" 

Jane spends the next two minutes laughing herself into a fit of hiccoughs.


End file.
